Investing in offshore warehousing to manage your inventory can be prohibitively expensive and take up lots of management time. Outsourcing inventory management to a specialised logistics company can deliver greater savings and increased efficiencies.

Financial Efficiencies

Instead of spending time building up an offshore warehousing operation, outsourcing allows you to concentrate on what’s most important to your business. The capital that’s needed to set up a foreign logistics capability could be better spent elsewhere: on manufacturing, marketing or new product development.

Operational Efficiencies

Capital expenditure isn’t the only financial benefit to outsourcing. Warehousing specialists have space that can adjust to demand, allowing you to rapidly scale operations when sudden surges in sales take place. Placing inventory in warehouses closer to customers can reduce delivery distances and costs. Being able to minimise inventory levels by transferring stock between warehouses optimises your working capital investment.

Exporters choose UPS for outsourced logistics as we have over 35-million square feet of distribution and warehousing facilities around the world. They are strategically located at approximately 1,000 sites in more than 120 countries and are often sited at UPS’s own airports. They therefore tap into an unrivalled distribution network that includes planes and delivery trucks, vans and tractors.

The benefits of using UPS are:

Specialised Warehousing Technology

UPS invests heavily in IT that better manages serial numbers and expiration dates, which improves the quality of the products that get delivered to your customers. The technology also provides you with the visibility you need: inventory age analysis, snapshots of inventory movement, and shipment confirmations.

Specialised Facilities

UPS can offer specialised facilities for certain industries, including pharmaceuticals and electronics, often with built-in call centre and technical support. Healthcare warehouses are temperature and humidity-controlled, and pressurised to prevent dust and insect contamination.

Inventory Processing

Inventory can be sorted and products assembled and labelled before being distributed. Price ticketing, repacking, quality control inspections, quarantines, and inspections are some of the services UPS offers. These processes can also take place in bonded warehouses before re-exportation.

Returns

UPS offers a complete returns operations solutions, which could include the detailed screening of returned goods at our facilities as well as repairing and testing products for redistribution or re-entry into inventory.

If you have an e-commerce business that sells directly to consumers, offshore warehousing might be the one solution to ensure your products are competitively priced. Instead of sending individual items the whole export journey, shipping costs can potentially reduce if you send pallet or container-load consignments to the offshore warehouse and combine with local final mile delivery. This can speed up the time between order and delivery, which makes your customers happy.

For companies that don’t wish to outsource inventory management, UPS Trade Direct® is an integrated solution that allows you to bypass distribution centres by shipping directly to retail stores or customers’ doors. Leveraging the breadth and reliability of the UPS global network, UPS Trade Direct provides consolidation of international freight, air, ocean and ground transportation, customs clearance and direct delivery to multiple addresses within the destination country, all through a single source.

UPS will pick up or receive your shipments, provide consolidation, transport your shipment to the destination country, provide customs clearance, deconsolidate into individual shipments, drop them into either the UPS package or less-than-truckload (LTL) network and deliver them directly to your customers.